Download An Introduction to Ethics: Cambridge Introductions to by John Deigh PDF

This ebook examines the principal questions of ethics via a learn of theories of correct and improper which are present in the good moral works of Western philosophy. It makes a speciality of theories that proceed to have an important presence within the box. The center chapters disguise egoism, the eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle, act and rule utilitarianism, glossy traditional legislation concept, Kant's ethical thought, and existentialist ethics. Readers may be brought not just to the most rules of every conception yet to modern advancements and defenses of these rules. a last bankruptcy takes up themes in meta-ethics and ethical psychology. The discussions all through draw the reader into philosophical inquiry via argument and feedback that remove darkness from the profundity of the questions below exam. scholars will locate this booklet to be a really worthy consultant to how philosophical inquiry is undertaken in addition to to what the foremost theories in ethics carry.

Together with 3 of his most renowned and demanding essays, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Essay on Bentham, besides formative decisions from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, this quantity presents a uniquely perspicuous view of Mill's moral and political thought.

* comprises Mill's most renowned and influential works, Utilitarianism and On Liberty in addition to his very important Essay on Bentham.
* makes use of the 1871 variation of Utilitarianism, the final to be released in Mill's lifetime.
* comprises decisions from Bentham and John Austin, the 2 thinkers who most affected Mill.
* advent written via Mary Warnock, a hugely revered determine in 20th-century ethics in her personal correct.
* presents an intensive, updated bibliography with the simplest scholarship on Mill, Bentham and Utilitarianism.

Additional resources for An Introduction to Ethics: Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy

Example text

Happiness, when used in the second sense, means something like a permanent or long-lasting state of well-being and satisfaction with ones situation. Its opposite is misery. This second sense, and not the first, is the sense we intend when we speak of the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is not the pursuit of elation or joy. It is the pursuit of a durable state of well-being and satisfaction with ones life. This pursuit is what egoism takes to be the context of right and wise action, and accordingly it is in this second sense of happiness that the word is used to formulate the fundamental principle of egoism.

This point nicely fits with the important observation that the object of a desire cannot be the pleasure one gets from the satisfaction of that desire.

It will be the project of the next several chapters to examine these different theories. The first ones we will examine are teleological. ) Afterwards we will take up those that are deontological. Once our survey is complete, we will turn to an important twentiethcentury skeptical attack on these theories and the alternative ethics it offers. Our examination of the latter will lead to general questions about practical reason and ethical knowledge, whether either is possible and if it is, how shall we understand it.